Progress 09/15/22 to 09/14/23
Outputs
Target Audience:Having already developed powerful content and hands-on learning protocol designed to deliver critical knowledge to aspirational farmers in the Gulf Coast region, our first order of business was learning how to best communicate with a potential student population in our expanded market focus and implementing ongoing evaluation to guide us in making timely adjustments to better serve them. Taking on the systemic barriers that limit the entry and success of new farmers requires a multi-faceted approach, and we feel strongly that our newly minted farmers should be from or reflect the communities they serve, which is why we engaged the community in our Marketing and recruitment planning and efforts. With a goal to attract more black, indigenous, people of color and female participants into Hope Farms' Growing Urban Farmers program, we convened a focus group comprised of members of the community who shared cultural and economic traits with our target market. Using language developed together, we built and launched a multi-prong promotional campaign specifically for this effort to activated native, social and earned media efforts highlighting aspects of our training that set it apart from other opportunities in the space: hands-on learning combined with formal lectures specific to the Gulf Coast region; exposure to topic experts and local leaders in the industry spanning touchpoints from soil to customer; mentorships with seasoned farmers and regular "thought" gatherings of trainees, alum, ag educators, community leaders, master farmers and chefs. Audience Emphasis African American Hispanic or Latino Limited resource producers Military veterans Organic producers Small farms Specialty crop producers Urban producers Women Total Number of Participants: 96 Actual cumulative number of participants who as a result of your program: Started Farming: Target - 15,Actual - 20 Helped prepare to start farming: Target - 62,Actual - 52 Improved farming success: Target - 500,Actual - 54 Changes/Problems:RE GROWING URBAN FARMERS INTENSIVE CLASSES. We find that the biggest challenge to date of operating an intensive hands-on schedule for small groups of students is managing cultural clashes instigated by disruptive participants. Often this can happen behind the scenes and go unknown to instructors and proctors until tempers flare or bullies go too far. This can impact not only the sense of student well being and program satisfaction, it can impact knowledge retention and program participation by impacted students. Working with our evaluator and education professionals, we developed an anonymous monthly survey to measure program satisfaction which successfully surfaced these tensions and interactions in time for corrective measures. We determined that program directors and educators must be trained and empowered with Human Resource skills to most effectively manage these small, intensive groups using information gathered through these anonymous surveys. They must also be willing to expel students for poor group behavior. RE NEW TRADITIONS MASTER CLASSES. Our original Master Class design grouped together in depth content requiring 8-15 hours of hands-on training, which presented similar challenges for participation-either the 1-day classes were too long, or the multi-week schedules were difficult for students to commit to. We learned that it is important to craft smaller bites of content into shorter classes that can be taken on a Saturday morning or afternoon or a weekday evening to experience more robust registration and completion. RE NEW TRADITIONS ONLINE LEARNING PLATFORM While interviewing production companies to translate in-person learning content to online content, we surfaced a serious gap between the knowledge and goals of our education team and that of outsourced vendors. Learning that our project would require a contracted production company to hire and train a dedicated producer who would have to gain working knowledge of our content, which would drive up the cost and put us over budget. We determined that the better approach-which would work within our budget, would instead be a divided approach. We would hire a new Foundation staff member who is a professional content developer and production manager to work with a contracted video filming and edit crew. This should simplify the communication between our education team and the ultimate video producers and more seamlessly deliver the envisioned product. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?See Other Products section for a list of all trainings and professional development How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?
Nothing Reported
What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?To survive, new farms-both urban and rural, must be financially sustainable, which requires a working knowledge of location specific horticultural practices, solid business skills and a robust peer network. It is extremely expensive to learn on the job, and most new farming enterprises fail within three years. Advance training, continuous knowledge acquisition and a solid peer network is critical to success. Other than the obvious limitations of an aspirational or beginning farmers' available time and investment capital-particularly for members of the BIPOC community, women and veterans-a clear barrier to any new successful training effort is the ability of the program to equitably address the variability of experience, expectations, and goals that each brings. With the support of BFRDP-NIFA, we endeavor to increase the number of economically and environmentally sustainable urban farms operated by socially disadvantaged farmers in Houston and along the Gulf Coast by tackling issues of localized knowledge, available time, training expense, and access to professional and peer to peer support especially for members of the BIPOC community, women and veterans. We continue to maximize the reach of Growing Urban Farmers New Traditions and ensure its ultimate success by providing customizable platforms, extended learning and robust networking opportunities, and making business incubation support available in an integrated training program designed to support working and underserved students. Ultimately, students may choose the classes that best fit their needs, interests, and schedules, allowing them to leverage their basic training into even more profitable urban agriculture specialties and skills. We are offering sliding scholarships that waive up to 100% of the tuition for every iteration of our training. At the core of the program is our Growing Urban Farmers intensive training, a three-month, hands-on course involving students in the full range of day-to-day and strategic aspects that make a small urban working farm financially successful. To better fit students' work and family obligations, we recently adjusted the 12-week intensive to 20 hours a week, allowing participants to continue to hold a job or manage school-aged children. This has proven extremely popular with the Fall '23 cohort of students already three times the size of the Spring '23. In addition to the intensive, a series of New Traditions Master Classes offering advanced and specialty deep-dive short courses are held throughout the year and made more accessible to socially disadvantaged students with convenient scheduling, scholarships, and/or waived tuition and fees. We frequently hold these on Saturdays and evenings for the greatest convenience to our potential students. In our first year, we have conducted ten extended learning opportunities, attracting fifty students (some repeatedly). To further reduce participation barriers, we are working to design a sophisticated, easy to use online version of Hope Farms' Growing Urban Farmers New Tradition Intensive and Master Classes. We want to offer these classes using a mobile-friendly platform that is accessible anytime either online or via cellular service by both smartphone and computer. While we are deeply knowledgeable about direct content delivery, we had a steep learning curve about the fast-developing best practices for online learning. We convened an advisory board of professionals to guide our decision making and planning, which delayed the start, but we are confident that the final product will be far superior. To build the program, we have selected a Learndash plugin for our Hope Farms WordPress website. Our intention is to design a learner-centric course that not only achieves the desired knowledge outcome, but also provides an engaging experience. We have finalized selection of our camera crew and hired a professional content developer and production manager who will begin filming in the fall of 2023. Finally, having a mentor can change the playing field for a small business. Research has shown that small businesses that receive mentoring early in the development of the business achieve higher revenues and increased business growth. Farming businesses are no different. We are helping build social capital for our students by incubating a collegial, peer-to-peer network of urban farmers that will continue to exist and grow through Farmer Talks, a series of quarterly networking gatherings of trainees, alumni, ag educators, community leaders, master farmers and chefs who will share best practices and experiences with each other. These gatherings also serve as a platform for Extension Agents and others to provide continuing education. We hosted two large and eight smaller gatherings over the course of our first year, helping to build powerful connections among successful, beginning and aspirational farmers. In fact one alumni secured a job through this network. We built upon proven evaluation tactics using a third-party evaluation scientist to capture each trainee's previous knowledge of farming, degree of prior exposure to farming and the business of farming, and the overall effectiveness of the Growing Urban Farmers New Traditions training program. Upon application and after completion of training, each student completes a short survey assessing their agricultural and business exposure in addition to their self-efficacy of training on the farm. We conduct additional in-person interviews midway through training, at the completion of their program to assess knowledge retention. We conduct follow-up interviews at 6 months and 1 year after they complete their training to track their continued pursuit of farming as a meaningful full or part time career. The first cohort of students measured for this progress reflected an increase in horticultural knowledge and farming practices of 46.5%, achieving an average of 85% on knowledge testing. At the end of the Spring GUF Intensive, one half of them continued to pursue food growing and horticulture immediately after training and were still growing food at scale six-months after completion of training. Once online- only training opportunities become available in Year 3, we will adapt these methods to accommodate the volume and interface differences for online-only students. Incentives for feedback may be utilized, but the same milestones and analysis will be retained. All of these data were reviewed by Dr. Melissa Paschalis and are being submitted with this report. We plan to compile summary reports and make them available to the broader farming community upon request via links on our website. Personal identifying information in data files will be removed to minimize disclosure risk.
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
Having already developed powerful content and hands-on learning protocol designed to deliver critical knowledge to aspirational farmers in the Gulf Coast region, our first order of business was learning how to best communicate with a potential student population in our expanded market focus and implementing ongoing evaluation to guide us in making timely adjustments to better serve them. Taking on the systemic barriers that limit the entry and success of new farmers requires a multi-faceted approach, and we feel strongly that our newly minted farmers should be from or reflect the communities they serve, which is why we engaged the community in our Marketing and recruitment planning and efforts. With a goal to attract more black, indigenous, people of color and female participants into Hope Farms' Growing Urban Farmers program, we convened a focus group comprised of members of the community who shared cultural and economic traits with our target market. Using language developed together, we built and launched a multi-prong promotional campaign specifically for this effort to activated native, social and earned media efforts highlighting aspects of our training that set it apart from other opportunities in the space: hands-on learning combined with formal lectures specific to the Gulf Coast region; exposure to topic experts and local leaders in the industry spanning touchpoints from soil to customer; mentorships with seasoned farmers and regular "thought" gatherings of trainees, alum, ag educators, community leaders, master farmers and chefs. We recruited Dr. Melissa Paschalis, who has a particular sensibility about the health impacts of food systems and the importance of small-scale regenerative agriculture in the food chain, to design entry and exit evaluation tools to capture the base of knowledge possessed by new students along with their expectation of the content, impact of our training and vision for what they personally hoped to accomplish with it. She supplemented these benchmark data sets with monthly captures of student knowledge retention along with their self-efficacy of program content and delivery. This helped program designers and instructors make course correction decisions to achieve better outcomes for students. These data also helped us continue to tweak our recruitment and onboarding language to ensure student expectations align with program priorities and content. ? Increase awareness of farming as a viable career, especially in socially disadvantaged communities STEPS: 1. Conducted a broad based publicity campaign. 2. Hosted monthly Future Farmers Orientations to introduce opportunity to a total of 42 prospective students 3. Collaborated with 32 partner organizations to publicize farming as a career and Growing Urban Farmers as a pathway to successfully pursuing it. 4. Promoted climate positive impact of urban farming to mainstream press Increase the number of BIPOC trainees who complete at least 24 hours (2 classes) of training in Master Class topics STEPS: 1. Offered popular Master Class topics in a user-friendly schedule of shorter 1-day/evening tracks of less than 24 hours attracting 50 students as well as 3 who completed more in-depth programming. Beginning and new farmers (in their first 10 years of operation) participate in 1 + classes in New Traditions' Gulf Coast-focused online farmer training program STEPS 1. Hired production team for video production. 2. Selected a website builder compatible with our WordPress website platform and designed to deliver high quality content 3. Drafted structure of our online training site Formalize the network of support for beginning and new Gulf Coast urban farmers (quarterly Farmer Fridays) STEPS 1. Assembled a group of 34 professionals active in growing, distributing, preparing and selling agricultural products 2. Pivoted from Fridays to evenings -renames "Farmer Talks" and hosted two farmer gatherings to share best practices and provide networking opportunities. 3. took our trainees on six field trips to area food producers to build relationships and witness best practices. 4. took our trainees to two regional conferences to network with other farmers and learn best practices
Publications
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